The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in Michael Korda's epic “Muse of Fire”.
With “Muse of Fire”, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of “Alone and Hero”, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation-destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England-and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives. In a sweeping narrative that echoes “The Guns of August”, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it. As the success of Pat Barker's “Regeneration”, the remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, and the images of brutal trench warfare in today's Ukraine demonstrate, contemporary interest in "the war to end war" remains high.
Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen were arguably the greatest poets writing in English during WWI. Malcolm Hillgartner delivers Michael Korda's biographies of them, telling the story of how the attitudes of poetry--and to a lesser extent of the British public--shifted as the war went on. From Brooke's glorification of warfare to Owen's r
